From Geek to Star #11 - Building Experience

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Episode 11: Experience compounds your value over time

In previous episodes, we’ve explored key traits that power your recognition and impact over time: Soft Skills, Hard Skills, Industry Knowledge, and Nurturing Curiosity & Relationships.

Today, I will touch upon another essential one: Experience.

🎢 What Experience Really Means

Experience isn’t just consuming content, going to meetings, following training… it’s the hands-on, real-world application of doing the work. Going from theory to practice.

The kind of refined judgment and intuition that emerges after trial, error, challenge and reflection. It builds through time and is unique to each of us based on what we lived as experiences and also how we perceived these experiences. Structured knowledge, while essential, lacks the nuance that only lived experience can bring.

In this age of AI, I believe that your real-world experience is part of your unique selling point as an individual, it is a layer of value AI can’t replicate. Think of this like the difference between highly profiled consultancies that can be very good at providing best practices for a company, but cannot replace real know-how of experts with boots in the ground to implement the effective changes. 

👴 Senior Professionals: Turning years into a Force Multiplier

Some of you may have watched a comedy called “The Intern”, released in 2015, where Robert De Niro’s character plays the role of a seventy-year-old person realising that retirement isn't an enjoyable experience. As a result, he decides to work as an intern at an e-commerce fashion store and finds himself in a completely different work environment with “outdated skills” on his side. Turns out that he manages to turn around the situation and bring all his previous experience with him and ends up: 

• Mentoring younger colleagues with calm and broad perspective, drawing parallels with former situations he lived which could be relevant even in a new world of full digital.
  

• Catching problems unseen by those younger fellows who may not have lived so many various situations.

It's not just in movies. Actually, back around 2010, I was working at a leading online travel agency in Europe, whose parent company was the French National Railways, a very old institution. We had some senior colleagues from this institution detached to our much younger digital company, and what they did not compare with us in terms of tech expertise, they more than compensated with the wealth of business and industry knowledge to explain the ins and outs, situations and contexts to have in mind when implementing digital products and services. But what is also true is that they were super curious to also understand better the tech on their side even if not becoming experts. In today's age of AI, such profiles may also become very valued to interact and feed AI with such knowledge, provided they know how to cultivate this. 

What to emulate from this:

• Mentor others: conduct brown bags, pair sessions, 1:1 catch-ups.
  

• Teach from experience: share war stories that illustrate “why” and “not just how.”
  

• Board-like mindset: even without the title, apply systems thinking to elevate decisions.

🧑‍💻 Mid-Career Professionals (30s to 40s): Capitalize on Patchwork Experiences

At this stage, you’ve been through several domains such as: architecture, launch cycles, tech stacks, crisis fixes, all of these probably across different companies or even industries.

• DIY mentor: share your journey through discussions or insights at work when meeting similar situations - “here’s how I solved that crisis in X weeks.” Identify what worked before or what did not work, why and formalise this to your peers, managers, leaderships as food for thought.
  

• Public speaker: look at opportunities to share about your experience, your projects in internal events, in meetups or in tech conferences, on topics where you have gained good knowledge be it EU regulations on AI, cybersecurity resilience, cloud migration, development and monitoring of micro services systems.... Start small, at your team or department level for example and then expand later. Doing so will help you to consolidate your learnings and strengthen your experience and how to share it.
  

• Focus on a given industry? This advice is an open question actually. We tend to think that working in tech, our skills are basically portable to any industry. For example, if you are a system reliability engineer, does it matter that you are working in Finance, Manufacturing, Travel and Hospitality, Health…? A few years back, I would have answered that it doesn't matter. Having now worked in various tech leadership roles across industries for 25 years, but still mostly in Travel and Hospitality, I’ve come to think that understanding an industry very well and then bringing the tech expertise to transform it can be a real differentiator for you to have more value and be more recognized. 

As you progress in your mid-career stage, looking back at the different companies and industries you’ve been working in, you may consider developing your forte in a specific industry.

This is about turning what you’ve done into what others can leverage through you.

🧑‍🎓 Early-Career: Build Experience as Your Differentiator

I believe that for you, young tech engineer, things are going to be tough: you’re competing today against AI on raw output. Technically, AI may be stronger, faster, cheaper than a young graduate so companies may invest less in young engineers. Therefore, your added value must include experience-based context:

• Join open source, side projects, or internships to gain credible hands-on experience. Particularly, I believe that open source can be a very strong leverage. Even if you have little experience, there's much to contribute to for anyone (starting from documentation, translation, bug fixing… to code contribution) and the more you will do, the stronger you will get. This is something you can really do on your own, not depending from any internships, any jobs, any company.
  

• Document your learnings: a short post on “how I architected a feature” shows context, not just code.
  

• Reflect on mistakes openly: this shows maturity, not weakness.

Even a small project, shared and reflected upon, becomes an experience you own, not just coded.

⏳ The Snowball Effect of Experience

Experience grows your contextual understanding, speeds your decisions, and deepens trust from others. But of course, building your own experience means that you have to use your brain / use AI smartly and not just copy / paste your work from AI as the illustration of this article points it out, otherwise you won't have much specific to bring on the table!

Over time, you become not just a doer but a go-to voice for insights shaped by events, failures, and successes.

• It differentiates you when AI cannot replicate storytelling or context.
  

• It compounds with your other traits—Industry Knowledge, Soft Skills, etc.
  

• It offers real value to mentorship, client trust, and team impact.

📍 Your Experience-Building Actions This Week

• Senior: Mentor a junior engineer, share 3 lessons from your past failures.
  

• Mid: Host a mini-retrospective on what worked and pivoted in your last project.
  

• Junior: Start a 2‑week small side project (open source or personal), then share a short write-up on challenges and learnings.

Add #GeekToStarExperience in your post and mention me on Linkedin, I’ll feature a few in a future issue!

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

What’s one real-world experience that looking back made you step up in your career?

Reply to this email, I read every note.

And don’t forget: follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don't hesitate to engage discussions there in the comments to also start showing and sharing your thoughts publicly. 

✨ Stay curious, stay connected!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward